If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

How is this 3d card... ?

I will buy a new PC and these are the spec's:

533 Mhz intel celeron
128 mb ram
128 bit soundblaster
and the 3dcard is a ATI Xpert 2000 32 mb, and it supports all the cool ones, OpenGL, Direct3D and stuff..
Is it good? I mean, the computer is cheap, and I am not that rich to lay my money on a more expensive graph card like GeForce or RivaTNT latest.

Guys, just one more thing:
instead of Celeron 533, it is now a AMD k6/2 550 mhz. dont ask why.
someone told me I could have problems with the TNT2 card on a amd k6/2, so he suggested me gettin the ATI card instead. what do U think?

You might also want to consider a Viper II. That card has awesome speed for its price range. After puting a $5 Socket 7 fan on its heatsink, it went up to a solid 150MHz core, and 165MHz memory. Which means around 600 Mtexel/s in 16 bit and heavily multi-texturing games. (Slightly less in 32 bit, due to SDR memory bandwidth, but still the drop is a lot less than I expected.)

Plus, Unreal Tournament runs like greased lightning on it with the MeTaL driver. Let's just say I just had a refreshing round of DM-2ndSpaceBeacon in 1280x1024 on it. That's THE map that makes your computer crawl in UT. It's a huge map, with several layers of tunnels and walkways. Try that on a TNT2 and you'll be lucky to get 10 fps when sniping from the walkways.

The down side is that the drivers are still a tad flaky, though they're almost there now.

Alternately, you can try a Matrox G400 with 32 MB. (The version with 16 MB also has half the memory bandwidth, AFAIK.) The price is decent nowadays, the image quality is SUPERB, and it should marginally outrun a TNT2 at the same core speed. And with a cheap fan, you can get it to 160 MHz core (from 126!) and 180 MHz memory. That's almost a G400 Max, for the price of a normal one. Not bad at all, if you ask me.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. Forget the ATI cards. With the debatable exception of the Rage Fury MAXX, they're not anywhere near fast in games. They're supposed to be business cards, not gamer's cards. I.e., the kind of cheap card Joe from accounting gets in his work PC to run Excel.

Moraelin, can you post some score's from 3DMARK 2000 really interested in what your getting. Looking for good D3D and open gl scores. Currently using S540 card from Diamond getting old in the tooth thinking of replacing it but currently running a Athlon Asus K7M limited to agp*2 mode.

It's difenteley the best bang for the buck. My Viper II goes up to 163Mhz core clock and 180Mhz of memory clock rock stable... and it's got a nice fill-rate too... it's better then Voodoo 3 and beter then TNT 2 (wich is BETTER then Voodoo 3, and ALSO has better image quality).

Don't get any ATI cards. They have horable drivers. Even a Voodoo3 2000 would be faster than an Xpert 2000. Yes, If this is a Celeon 533a FC-PPGA, you will run faster and cooler than the older Celron 533 PPGA. Both are Socket 370, but the 533a uses the new PIII coppermine core (with 1/2 the cache disabled). It might add up to $50 to the price, but would be woth it (and overclocks GREAT).

Well, on the overclocked Viper II I'm getting around 3500 in 3DMark2000, default benchmark, on an Athlon 750. More if I push the bus up to 122 MHz, and lower the multiplier.

Mind you, that's largely because 3DMark2000 is mostly single-textured. The Viper II is an interesting card. You get only about half the speed in single-textured games, but in stuff that does massive multi-texturing (like UT) it really flies.

Another good part about it seems to be that the speed drop from going from 16 bit to 32 bit isn't that large. I mean, ok, there IS a penalty, but for a SDR card and in that price range it's still very decent IMHO.

What's wrong with the MAXX is latency. Each frame is still rendered by one single graphics chip. The time since you move the mouse until you see the movement on the screen is the same as if you had half the FPS.

E.g., if you play at high resolution and get, say, 40 fps... your control of the game is basically the same as if you had only 20 fps.

Which basically makes the games look smoother, but fails to address the real reason people often quote for needing better speed. That reason is: ease of control. If your fps drops to, say, 10 fps, it becomes a pain in the behind to control the game. Anyone can tell you that if you drop to 10fps in a missle duel, you're dead meat. What happens is: by the time you see the crosshair on the target, you've already overshot it by a few degrees. Not only that, but the same delay happens to the target's own positioning. By the time you finally took correct aim at its position, you're actually aiming at where it was 100ms before.

Only on a MAXX, the same happens at twice the fps. When you think you're getting a decent 30 fps, you're getting as much delay as for 15 fps. Worse yet, looking at the fps counter you don't even have a clue that it's bad, and you need to decrease your resolution. You're dead meat, even though your fps counter says you shouldn't be. And even worse yet, no matter how much you decrease the resolution, you can't drop under your FPU's processing limit. If your FPU can compute triangles for at most 40 fps, that's it. No matter how much you lower the res, you can't get more than that. Only on a MAXX, your control accuracy will be half that: 20 fps. Your minimum possible control delay is as if your CPU was half speed.

Mind you, I'm not saying you actually need 60fps for good control accuracy. Most of the time 20..30 will do just as well. Plus, if nothing else, the delay most often depends just as much on the mouse drivers and other factors. (E.g., if your mouse only reports 20 times a second, having 100 fps won't help THAT much.)

But I'm saying that the MAXX doesn't really make this problem any easier. It's a scam to make it look better in benchmarks, without actually being better for game control purposes.

TheDaishi
don't mean to pick at you, but is a 3dmark of 3600 on 3dmark99 or 2000?
also the maxtor diamond plus max 40 never came in 13.6gig?
and the SB 128, although a very good card, is just a 128bit version of a SB 64, and in no way a SB live!

people that drive slow are easy to pass, it's people who drive fast that provide a challange.

Instead of getting that k6 cpu, you should get an athlon 600 0r 700, you can get them for only $200 if you go to Buybuddy.com. and if i were you i'd get the voodoo 3500, because it's a pretty good card and has a lot of extras like tv tuner.